


half of what I say is meaningless

by firstaudrina



Series: 1990s musicians au [1]
Category: Gossip Girl
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-12
Updated: 2016-05-12
Packaged: 2018-06-08 00:55:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6832306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Blair is a pop sensation and Dan has all the angst. 1990s musician AU</p>
            </blockquote>





	half of what I say is meaningless

**Author's Note:**

> For stainofmylove! Another old fic I'm finally putting up here.

Dan sees her on television first. It's a music video, her candy colored ladylike lacquer locked in place. Being a good girl is what Blair sells and the hypocrisy of it makes Dan's teeth ache.

"God, these pop tarts," Vanessa complains.

Dan is tooling around on his guitar. "They're just embarrassing themselves," he says, but his gaze cuts back to the tv screen, that slight figure in all her pastel tulle, spinning and laughing like she's having the time of her life, giving a cheeky wink to the camera over her shoulder.

Dan really hates those shiny little dog and pony shows.

 

 

 

 

Jenny quits the band and goes solo. It leaves Dan and Vanessa in the lurch, just the two of them messing around with a guitar and drums, no vocalist to speak of. The worst part is that Jenny's better off without them, her smoky voice no longer dragged down by Dan's overly complex lyrics and Vanessa's discordant music. Jenny's got a good voice and she's pretty and blonde and young, so she gets picked up right away, lifted out of the club scene she and Dan grew up in not even a month after striking out on her own.

They like to market her as the antidote to the Blairs and Serenas of the music scene but she ends up another kind of poison, writhing around skinny and big-eyed in a shirt masquerading as a dress.

Dan channels his resentment into new songs.

 

 

 

 

One day while she's listening to him fuck around with lyrics, Vanessa tilts her head thoughtfully and says, "You know, you're not a bad singer."

Dan scoffs, because yeah right.

"I mean it," Vanessa says.

She won't let up about it because Vanessa has never let up about anything the entire time Dan has known her, so he ends up pushed into the spotlight in a smoky cramped club two nights later. He stands there dazed a moment, blinking, and someone yells out _come the fuck on already_ so Dan's fingers find his guitar strings and he starts to sing.

He likes to think that it's his talent that gets the band signed but really it's that the label doesn't want to pass up having a whole cabal of Singing Humphreys.

They start off opening for Jenny but then it gets bigger and bigger, their fame this entire other person in the room with its own thoughts and habits. Girls recognize Dan. People call him a sell-out. People say his songs are beautiful, a kind of poetic lyricism not seen since the days of, well, his own father.

"My dad didn't even write his own songs," Dan says, and everyone laughs like he made a big joke. He gets a lot of laughs these days and he can never tell whether they're with or at him.

 

 

 

 

When Blair enters the party it doesn't look unlike one of her music videos. She's got a crew of flunkies behind her who have adopted her uniform, recreating her look right down to the headbands with only the slightest tweaks to color or style. "Martini," she barks dismissively and one of the girls scurries off. Her sharp gaze surveys the crowd, landing on Dan and Vanessa, nearest by. Her nose wrinkles. "God," Blair says, "They'll just let anyone in, won't they?"

All it takes is the sight of one of those pop princesses to make Vanessa's blood boil, so she snaps back, "Obviously, since you're here."

Blair rolls her eyes and Dan takes that moment to interject, after a slow sip of beer, "You look like a My Little Pony."

Blair looks at him like she had no idea he could speak – like she had no idea a creature so low as him could speak – before she says sharply, "Well you look like you don't shower." And she flounces off, crew trailing behind her.

Dan drinks too much whiskey and ends up shoved in the corner, feeling flushed and also confused as to why he's still here. Vanessa disappears to hook up with the bassist of some other band on their label. He watches Blair Waldorf hold court until Serena shows up, when suddenly everything shifts, like it does every time Serena shows up somewhere. She's got less talent than Blair but more number ones so everybody wants to be her friend instead, crowding around her. She's a golden pinprick of light in a dark wave of embarrassing sycophants.

Off to the side, Blair pouts. Tomorrow there will be another Blair vs Serena headline on the gossip magazine covers, one always stealing the other's spotlight or boyfriend or wearing the same dress to the same events, high school stuff.

Dan tips another whiskey back. Same shit different day.

 

 

 

 

Dan is finding this industry is less about music and more about image. He just wanted to write songs, which sounds so stupidly simple. The kind of songs that would make people think. The kind of songs his father would've liked, not that he'd ever admit to that particular desire. But no; they want Dan to have hits and take pictures and tousle his hair just so and play a show with his shirt open.

Vanessa fights all their battles for him. She goes on about purity of the music and integrity of their group identity. Dan agrees but simultaneously finds the whole thing kind of futile. The fringe types are in these days and the harder they fight the more it catapults them forward.

Sometimes he thinks it's easier to be the Blair Waldorfs of the world. There's clarity of purpose there, a clean direct line. There's got to be in-fighting and constant scrambling to stay on top, but at least you know where you're going.

Then again, the seedy underside of all things cannot be forgotten. Dan knows a lot of addicts coming from where he did, plus he's got addiction in his blood, but it feels like nothing in the face of these pretty girls and boys who are handed drugs by their management like candy. Dan can recognize that drug-fed darkness that only more and more drugs can illuminate for briefer and briefer stretches of time. But it feels so out of their hands, strings pulled by a higher power; so when articles run about Serena's drug problem, her endless partying and the half-assed cover-ups of her hospital stays, Dan can only feel bad for her. Vanessa says those people ask for it. Dan's not sure anyone asks for that. His dad didn't, at least.

Sympathy wars with his irritation and at the end of the day it's hard to determine which wins out.

 

 

 

 

Blair comes to him. Not _him_ exactly. She comes to Jenny, says –

"I need something new," she says, hands on her hips. Her nails are cotton candy pink. "An edge. New songs."

"I'm not giving you songs," Jenny says.

"I'm telling, not asking," Blair replies.

"More flies with honey," Dan interrupts, feels the slow shift of Blair's gaze to him for the second time ever.

"You write?" she says.

"I write," Dan confirms. "But not for _you_."

The glint in her eye says _we'll just see about that_.

 

 

 

 

There's an industry thing. Blair performs with her cupcake backup dancers but is blown out of the water by Serena, who does some rolling around wearing glitter and a snake. Blair is cute, a very specific kind of retro-pretty, and people are starting to age out of her. She's been relegated to a little girl's act, not sexy enough; Serena's sexy enough but everyone calls her a slut, so.

Blair gets drunk on gin and tonics. Dan's new best friend is whiskey. Nothing happens except he looks at her too much – the heart decals stuck around her eyes, the sweep of giant false eyelashes, the dark arranged curls, the sweetheart cut of her top, the fluff of skirt. She looks like a doll, the kind that's poseable and comes with a separate outfit.

Only Vanessa notices his noticing and says, with extreme disgust, "You’ve got a crush on the princess, don't you?"

Dan tells her to go fuck herself but, well. Occasionally he watches Blair's videos late at night, fingers around the neck of a bottle. Aside from the few heartfelt ballads, her songs are always so happy and she always looks so happy to sing them, twitching hips and big bouffant hair, a kind of pop art sixties superstar in a decade that has no use for that.

He doesn't _like_ her. She's a nasty diva bitch at the end of the day and he doesn't have time for that shit. But she does make him curious. There's no denying that.

 

 

 

 

He and Blair get in massive fights. He agrees to write her a song, _one song_ , but she hates it, keeps trying to change the words or the melody or both.

"You can go write your own fucking song if you don’t want this," Dan says. "And watch everyone get tired of you trotting out the same hits from when you were seventeen even though you're too old for that shtick now."

"Oh go cry into your flannel if you can't take an honest critique," she hisses. "You're overblown and pretentious and you lose your meaning bogging it down with pointless metaphor."

"What do you know," Dan says. "You look like a cartoon."

"I'd rather a cartoon than greasy and pathetic with bad hair."

"Yeah, well," he scoffs, "You _would_."

Blair looks at him for a moment, lips pursed, and decides, "You are an _idiot_ , Humphrey. Just rewrite the bridge, won't you?"

And for some reason he does.

 

 

 

 

Serena sweeps the Grammy's. They say Blair is robbed, camera lingering on her pinched, forcibly happy face. They say, they say.

Dan finds her at an after party tottering around on her tall skinny heels. He is filled with the strange desire to promise her a song that will make people take her seriously.

"I'm not interested in your bullshit tonight, Humphrey," she says. "Don't you have some Alternapalooza to headline or something?"

His jaw tightens. "I just wanted to see how defeat was treating you."

"Swell, sweetheart," she says sarcastically. "Now get me a drink or fuck off."

Dan gets her a drink. Then another and another. She loosens up enough to laugh a little, to stab a finger into his chest and proclaim as loud as the critics, "I was robbed!"

"Yeah you were," Dan says, smiling despite himself. "Your commercial jingle was definitely better than the other girls'."

Blair makes a face at him, tongue poking out.

Dan does not kiss her that night but for the first time he admits to himself that he wouldn't mind it.

 

 

 

 

Some paper with nothing better to do remarks on it, prints a picture of them with the seemingly mind-boggled subtitle _unlikely alliance of pop princess and rock'n'roll royalty?_ Which is enough to make Dan gag, really.

Blair calls him up, says, "That picture was enough to make me gag. I looked so puffy. Let's go get coffee, I'm hungover."

Vanessa does not appreciate what's going on, as much as Dan tries to play it off as a business relationship. It's a betrayal of her, it's a betrayal of everything they stand for, it's a betrayal plain and simple.

Dan was branded a sell-out before he'd ever sold so it doesn't bother him so much, really.

 

 

 

 

"Are we friends?" he asks once.

"I'm not friends with people who wear flannel," Blair says definitively.

 

 

 

 

Blair gets involved with this guy from a boy band with obnoxiously crystal-clear blue eyes and man-bangs. She says Dan is bad for her image, but the song they wrote together is the only hit she's had in months. The tabloids are starting to catch up with them. Vanessa is still furious and it's making recording sessions tense.

The cracks are forming here earlier than Dan would have anticipated. She declares he's addicted to the acclaim even though she knows better; she wants to go back to the tiny clubs, to scraping by. Dan knows there's no rewinding life. They're here now and that's that. Does he wish for the idyllic music-making of his father's career, where it felt like the music really _meant_ something? He does, sort of. He'd like to feel like more than a hired voice filling an allotted purpose and sometimes he almost does, in those late-night moments when it's just him and his guitar.

"You'll never be your father," Vanessa accuses once during a particularly vicious fight.

"Good," Dan snaps. "The last thing I want to be is some washed up old nobody who can't get clean."

Vanessa drops her gaze, mouth still tight with anger but regret already evident on her face. "Dan –"

"Don't," he says. "I don't want to hear it."

 

 

 

 

He shows up at Blair's that night with a bottle under one arm and a record under the other.

"What year do you think this is?" Blair says. "I don't have a record player. Let's do shots."

Dan is beginning to feel run-down from it all. He doesn't know how Blair does it, over and over, again and again, dusts herself to a shine and performs her little numbers like she's got something to prove, each time.

"Your hair is hideous," Blair tells him. She is tipsy, her pretty mouth pouting, and she reaches up to wrap curls around her fingers. "It's too long. All of you Seattle people have hair that's too long."

"I'm from Brooklyn, actually," Dan says.

"You know what I mean." She rakes long nails over his cheeks. Up close she is even more doll-like, her eyes glossy and big. "You gonna make your move or what, Humphrey?"

"I don't kiss trainwrecks," he says, head already tilting, eyes already closing.

"No wonder you never get kissed," she murmurs and closes the distance.


End file.
